Monday, January 27, we will meet in person.
Go to calendar for our schedule
Address for OHMC meditation space:
3812 Northampton St. NW, Washington DC 20015
Please arrive a few minutes early so we can invite the bell on time. You may also arrive 15 minutes early to practice working meditation by helping us set up cushions.
Dear friends,
This week, we will meet Monday evening, Jan. 27, from 7-8:30PM EST in person at our meditation space (3812 Northampton Street NW); Wednesday morning, Jan. 29, from 7-8AM EST online; and Friday, Jan. 31, from 12-1PM EST in person & online (hybrid).
On Monday, Annie will facilitate. Annie shares:
On Monday we will read the Five Mindfulness Trainings together and then we will invite some of the sangha members who received the trainings on January 4 to reflect on their journey with the trainings and why they chose to ceremonially receive them. Receiving the trainings is a personal commitment to practicing a loving and attentive way of life, and they are a gift from the sangha to support our practice.
We will hear from dana chapnick, Tracy Corley, Rachel Henigan, Franziska Mutz (by video), Gerry Oshman, and Mary Smith. Each completed the six-month class and each received a dharma name from Annie, Camille, and Jill. A few other folks from out of town also received the trainings with us, including Sam Maio, Lorna Pollack, Ana Valente, Ronald Nober, Gonzalo Neira Morales, and Maren Núñez Moscoso.
The Five Mindfulness Trainings have their root in the Five Precepts offered by the Buddha. They have been expanded and updated by Thay and the Plum Village community so that they represent a way to bring mindfulness into every area of life. Rather than hard-and-fast rules, they offer us a path to cultivate and develop actions of body, speech, and mind that can create a more healthy and compassionate world.
We look forward to seeing you then. Please enjoy this quote about the Mindfulness Trainings written by Roshi Joan Halifax and taken from the book For a Future to Be Possible: Buddhist Ethics for Everyday Life:
Practice is as well about crafting the art of living beautifully, honestly, and with strength and dignity. Precepts are a refinement of this craft; they are a mindfulness tool and a tool of compassion that can open body, speech, and mind to original wholesomeness. Precepts are also about deepening the experience of community. Thây has said often that the precepts are our protectors: they protect us and they protect other beings as well. If we are to live in peace with each other, with the four worlds of Grandmother Earth, we dedicate ourselves to the path of nonviolence toward all. We see ourselves in each thing, in each being. We know that harming others through body, speech, or mind is harming a part of ourselves. We see that our so-called individual identity is tied to all other identities, and so we are not a separate or local self, but in a continuum with all else. Thus the precepts can bring us to this sense of deep responsibility toward the greater world and also responsibility for ourselves as well. They are, in essence, a way for us to take care of our global and very local community…
Yet the fact is that we break precepts all the time. If we are able to see this, then there is some small possibility that we may cultivate compassion not only for our very human selves but for others as well.. Simply by living we take life. Leather shoes and belts, breathing in and out, a cup of water, a flushing toilet, a stroll in the forest, rinsing mustard greens, flying here and there, the daily newspaper: in each, a thousand things are dying and being born. Our thoughts can never be as pure as white snow in a silver bowl. Our speech is only so skillful. Treating our bodies and the bodies of others as precious stuff is not so easy, driven as we are by duty or desire, fear or confusion. We are called to be honest about the struggle most of us face daily in living a wholesome life.
We look forward to seeing you on Monday.
with love,
annie.